Milovan Djilas, Yugoslav Critic of Communism, Dies at 83

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Milovan Djilas, the Yugoslav Communist revolutionary whose denunciation of his former comrades in 1957 as a privileged and self-serving "new class" became an early banner of dissidents and anti-Communists, died in Belgrade yesterday. He was 83.

His son, Aleksa Djilas, a historian, said Mr. Djilas was treated Wednesday night for a heart complaint and died at home on Thursday. The elder Djilas had been increasingly weakened by age and heart problems in recent years, but he remained intellectually active to the end.

A revolutionary, soldier, political leader and writer, Mr. Djilas, in his own phrase, "traveled the entire road of Communism," from Partisan guerrilla fighter against Nazi occupiers of Yugoslavia and ardent believer in Stalinism, through disillusionment and revulsion at the "all-powerful exploiters and masters" it had brought to power -- Stalin first among them.

Mr. Djilas was the closest lieutenant to Tito in the resistance to the Serbian monarchy, in the Partisan struggle against German and Italian occupiers and in the creation of a Yugoslav Communist state. It was he whom Tito sent to Moscow in January 1948 to tell Stalin that Yugoslavia intended to pursue its own national development, independent of Moscow.

The divorce was made public in June 1948, and Yugoslavia became the first Communist state to break with the Kremlin, a move that gained it respect and assistance from the West and a leading role among nonaligned nations.

But Mr. Djilas (pronounced GEE-lahss) soon began to voice disenchantment with his own party, and in 1954 Tito expelled him from its ranks and from his Government posts. Mr. Djilas spent much of the next 36 years in prison or in official disgrace.

In January 1955 he was put on trial for "hostile propaganda" over an interview with The New York Times, and received a suspended sentence. It was at this time that he began work on "The New Class," as well as "Land Without Justice," a history of his native Montenegro. In December 1956 he was imprisoned for "slandering Yugoslavia" in statements made to a French magazine and in an article for The New Leader in New York.

The prison to which he was sent, Sremska Mitrovica, was the same in which he served three years as a young revolutionary, fresh out of law school, when he was arrested for organizing demonstrations against the monarchy. It is a reflection of Mr. Djilas's political development that during the first incarceration he learned Russian and in the second he studied English.

With prison imminent, Mr. Djilas managed to smuggle the manuscript of "The New Class" abroad. Its publication in 1957 was an immediate sensation.

Though the cold war was at its zenith and denunciations of Stalinism and Communism were common, the prevailing image of Communist leaders was of ruthless ideologues. "The New Class" was the first exposure from within a Communist state of leading Communists as a new elite dedicated to its own privileges and power, and the first denunciation of the system from an unimpeachable source.

"Membership in the Communist Party before the Revolution meant sacrifice," Mr. Djilas wrote in "The New Class." "Being a professional revolutionary was one of the highest honors. Now that the party has consolidated its power, party membership means that one belongs to a privileged class. And at the core of the party are the all-powerful exploiters and masters."

The criticism was devastating for Communists. Foreign and domestic attacks until then had focused on the ideology and the system, which Communists could rebuff as class warfare or ideological sniping. But Mr. Djilas accused the Communists of the highest hypocrisy, of living and acting like the "exploiters" they had fought against.

Among dissidents and critics of Communism, Mr. Djilas became a symbol of resistance, and "new class" entered their vocabulary as a synonym for the secretive and devious Communist ruling elite. Mr. Djilas's book became taboo in all Communist states, and it was not published in Yugoslavia until 1990.

"The New Class" resulted in another trial for Mr. Djilas on charges of being "hostile to the people and the state of Yugoslavia," for which he was given a seven-year sentence. After the appearance of another book, "Conversations With Stalin," in which he branded Stalin "the greatest criminal in history," five years were tacked on to his sentence.

After he had served nine and a half years, Tito set Mr. Djilas free, and he left on visits to Britain, the United States and Australia. "Prison transformed me," he said in an interview many years later. "It transformed me from an ideologist into a humanist."

He was a visiting professor at Princeton in 1968 when the Soviet Union led an invasion of Czechoslovakia. His criticism of that invasion and other interviews led to the revocation of his passport on his return, and it was not returned for 18 years.

Mr. Djilas spent most of the last decades of his life in Belgrade, writing commentaries, histories and novels.

Watching from afar the attempts by Mikhail S. Gorbachev to reform the Communist system in the Soviet Union, he predicted that the Soviet system would not survive the lifting of centralized control.

In 1988 Mr. Djilas told an interviewer who asked about Mr. Gorbachev's efforts that "his difficulties will begin in three or four years when decentralization, privatization and self-management will confront him with the painful fact that none of these reforms can be made really effective without revamping the political profile of Soviet society."

The collapse of Communist regimes across East Europe confirmed Mr. Djilas's critique of the system. But in his last years, Mr. Djilas seemed to move from satisfaction at the defeat of Communism in Yugoslavia to dismay at the ethnic violence that emerged in its aftermath.

He welcomed the first wave of anti-Communist demonstrations in Belgrade in March 1991, which he said reminded him of uprisings 50 years earlier against Prince Paul, who had attempted to align Yugoslavia with the Nazis.

But he opposed Belgrade's war against Croatia, gaining the opprobrium of the former Communists who had emerged as Serbian nationalists. The old Communist daily, Borba, accused him of betrayal.

In an interview with David Binder of The New York Times two years ago, Mr. Djilas said he could see "no way out" of the violence.

Nationalism, he said, had replaced Communism as the main ideological currency in the Balkans. And his life had taught him that "you cannot reform an ideology."

Mr. Djilas's pessimistic view of the Balkans came with his descent "from an ancient tribe of peasants and shepherds" in the mountains of Montenegro, in southern Yugoslavia. From his birth there on June 12, 1911, one of seven children of a Montenegrin officer, he wrote in his biographical book, "Land Without Justice," he was immersed in clan feuds:

His mother was from a Serbian clan that had settled in the area, but kept its Serbian identity. Leaving home at the age of 10, Mr. Djilas attended school in nearby towns and, at 19, enrolled at the University of Belgrade to study philosophy and law. Already drawn to Communism, he became a student leader.

His first arrest came in 1933. On his release he returned to the fray and, in 1937, met Josip Broz, head of the clandestine Communist Party, who went under the nom de guerre of Tito. Tito charged Mr. Djilas with finding volunteers for the Spanish Civil War and assigned him to the party's Politburo.

World War II claimed the lives of Mr. Djilas's father, two brothers and two sisters. He himself held key positions with the Partisans and their political arm.

Mr. Djilas made his first trip to Moscow in 1944 at the head of a military mission, and there he held the first of the meetings with Stalin that he subsequently described in "Conversations With Stalin." Though he arrived "totally loyal" to the Soviet leader, he wrote, he developed doubts that grew in subsequent visits to abhorrence.

Mr. Djilas's strongest differences with the Soviet leadership developed over the systematic looting and rape of Yugoslav civilians by the Red Army, and the reaction of Stalin and other Soviet leaders to his complaints. At a meeting in Moscow, Stalin ridiculed Mr. Djilas and demonstratively kissed his Serbian wife while accusing Mr. Djilas of ingratitude.

Mr. Djilas was instrumental in Tito's break with Stalin and the international Communist movement that Moscow dominated. He defended Yugoslavia's national Communism as editor and contributor to Kommunist, the theoretical journal, and to Borba, the party daily.

But by the early 1950's, Mr. Djilas was growing increasingly disenchanted with the course of Communist development, in Yugoslavia as elsewhere, and his writings became increasingly critical.

Ousted from the party in 1954 and under a suspended sentence, he lived jobless and under surveillance in Belgrade until the publication of an article, "The Storm in Eastern Europe," appeared in The New Leader in New York in 1956. The article welcomed the Hungarian uprising that year as the beginning of the end for state Communism. But it took three decades of prison and isolation before Mr. Djilas's prophesy came true.

In those years, Mr. Djilas completed many works of fiction, biography and history. He wrote a major biography of the Montenegrin prince-poet, Njegos, a translation of Milton's "Paradise Lost," and a classic about the partisan struggle entitled, "Wartime."

Mr. Djilas is survived by a daughter from his first marriage, Vukica, his son, Aleksa, and a grandson, all of Belgrade. His second wife, Stefanija, died in 1993. His first wife, Mitra, survives. Both were Partisan fighters. An Insider's Critique Of Stalin and Communism

From 'The New Class' (1957)

"In contrast to earlier revolutions, the Communist revolution, conducted in the name of doing away with classes, has resulted in the most complete authority of any single new class."

"A theater without an audience: the actors play and go into raptures over themselves. This is how it is with these high priests who are simultaneously policemen and owners of all the media which the human intellect can use to communicate its thoughts -- press, movies, radio, television, books, and the like -- as well as of all substance that keeps a human being alive -- food and roof over his head."

"There has not been a single noted scientist in the U.S.S.R. who has not had political trouble."

"In Stalin's time things reached the point where all forms of artistic expression were forbidden except those that Stalin himself liked. Stalin did not have particularly good taste . . ."

"History will pardon the Communists for much. But the stifling of every divergent thought, the exclusive monopoly over thinking for the purpose of defending their personal interests, will nail the Communists to a cross of shame in history."

"Even under Communism, men think, for they cannot help but think." From 'Conversations With Stalin' (1962)

"As I was leaving, Stalin presented me with a sword for Tito -- the gift of the Supreme Soviet. To match this magnificent and exalted gift I added my own modest one, on my way back via Cairo: an ivory chess set. I do not think there was any symbolism here. But it does seem to me that even then there existed inside of me, suppressed, a world different from Stalin's."

"Every crime was possible to Stalin, for there was not one he had not committed. For in him was joined the criminal senselessness of a Caligula with the refinement of a Borgia and the brutality of a Czar Ivan the Terrible. I was more interested, and am more interested, in how such a dark, cunning and cruel individual could ever have led one of the greatest and most powerful states, not just for a day or a year, but for 30 years."

"He was one of those rare terrible dogmatists capable of destroying nine-tenths of the human race to 'make happy' the one-tenth."

"Stalin's dethronement proves that the truth will out even if only after those who fought for it have perished. The human conscience is implacable and indestructible."

A version of this article appears in print on , Section B, Page 7 of the National edition with the headline: Milovan Djilas, Yugoslav Critic of Communism, Dies at 83. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe